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Hard Drive Woes

E

Energizer Bunny

Member
Having an infuriating problem with my hard drive.

I have 2 hard disks, one for Windows, the second for Steam and other games. I was doing a big of cable management earlier and to change something around had to pull the SATA cable out of the second hard disk. After a couple of seconds I put it back and then started the PC.

It started like normal, but now whenever I try to access the drive I get

"You need to format drive F before you can use it"

then

"The volume does not contain a recognised file system"

I know this often points to a corrupt partition but it seems suspect that the drive would just corrupt or break purely due to having the cable gently removed then re insterted.

Does anybody have any other ideas what this could be or how to resolve it? I've tried a swapping the cables between my primary and secondary drives with no luck.

Running Windows 7 Home Premium and the drive in question is 1.5 tb WD drive
 
Always use the 'safely remove hardware' widget when you disconnect drives...there is no such thing as 'gently' removing a cable, it is like you 'gently' removed your arm.

First step is to clone HD on to another HD, then you can try testdisk, and you got a good chance of getting the data back.
If testdisk don't work, then your options are more limited, and you need to start spending $$$ to get the data back.
The only reason I say to clone the HD, is, you have more options open to you, in case the first try at fixing it fails.
 
Windows my have shutdown and your fans are off, but if it was still plugged into the wall, the motherboard could still be receiving power. From my desktop days, I remember that some have a light on the board that stays lit to remind you of this. In the system I had the manual stated to unplug or hit the off switch on the back on the power supply before replacing RAM which is where the light was located.

To resolve your current issue, your data is intact. You'll need to do a partition recovery. I highly recommend testdisk. It's free, extremely powerful, but it's not user friendly, but it sounds like you got enough knowledge to use it. However, if I were you, I'd download the manufacture's diagnosis program or if your BIOS has one, run a basic SMART test just to ensure that the drive is ok-ish on the that level before running testdisk.

Best of luck.
 
Last edited:
Energizer Bunny said:
Really? Even with the pc switched off? My bad then guess ive been an idiot.

How would i go about cloning the disk?
Click to expand...

If the system was off while you were moving cables, then, it should have been (mostly) OK, unless static electricity zapped something.
There was one external drive I saw that even though the system was off, it still flashed the HD access LED when the cable was removed. This was with a IDE drive though. Sata drives should be much smarter about these things, but things can still happen.

There are lots of clone programs out there, clonezilla, whatever the maker's of the HD utility disc uses, and so on.
 
Thanks ill try one tomorrow. Weird thing is that windows sees the drive but not only does it not detect any file system under properties (not even RAW which i understand is normal for corrupect disks) but if i go to format it it detects the disk size as only 31.8gb
 
"To resolve your current issue, your data is intact. You'll need to do a partition recovery. I highly recommend testdisk. It's free, extremely powerful, but it's not user friendly, but it sounds like you got enough knowledge to use it. However, if I were you, I'd download the manufacture's diagnosis program or if your BIOS has one, run a basic SMART test just to ensure that the drive is ok-ish on the that level before running testdisk."

Thanks mate. I'm not familiar with testdisk but I'll go look for it tonight.
 
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